Late to the party

One of the problems with using an RSS Aggregator is that it gives the illusion of allowing you to keep up with a practically infinite number of weblogs. Whenever you find a link to a new weblog with an interesting entry, the temptation is high to subscribe to this blog to keep up with other writings on it. After doing this for a while, you end up with a huge number of subscriptions and find that there is a limit to what you can keep up with after all, even using an aggregator.

I've been suffering from this effect for a while. I currently have over 200 subscribed feeds and over 15,000(!) unread items. I simply don't have the time to keep up. These unread items have a fairly low signal-to-noise ratio - most of them I won't be interested in, but some I will, which is why I'm hesitant to just delete them. The problem is that feeds with a high signal-to-noise ratio tend to get lost between all the others, and I miss out on stuff or miss the context when reading an item without knowing the history (previous items) behind it. I really need to start purging my subscriptions to a more manageable size...

Anyway, this happened to me yesterday when I finally read some details about Sam's proposal for a successor to the RSS crown. Having missed the history prior to it, I did not realize he wasn't talking about RSS itself and left some out-of-place comments on his blog. Then today I finally found Tim Bray's article through a link from Mark and things started to make a lot more sense.

I think it's a great idea to wipe the slate clean and start over fresh knowing what we know now. Let's create a Really Simple Syndication format that's not just Really Simple for the feed-producer, but also for the feed-consumer. If this evolves into a standard, SharpReader will most definitely support it.

I apologize for being late to the party. Hopefully there's still a piece of pie left for me... pie left for me... pie left for me...

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